I know this isn’t usually an Autumn subject, though Shelley once famously said that ‘If Winter Comes can Spring be far behind?’, but having now been accepted by my friend’s two year old son to the extent I have been cuddled and then had a mouthful of juice spat in my face (Oh how I…
Category: Quotidial
Life On Life
It is, of course, almost an adage whilst being wholly true, that life feeds upon life. We may argue about its efficacy, its ethics and even the desirability of the facts but none-the-less it stands that to live, one thing must predate another. You can take this a bit far by suggesting that microbes that…
Voice Overs
It is perfectly normal for people to have sounds and voices in their heads – we all have someone reading away when we read and some of us read novels and even have different voices for different characters. I am not sure if this is a natural facility or one we learn from our parents…
FootSteps Press
We have created a new publishing house called FootSteps Press. We hope to make excellent, digitally published works available and we have a series of fine art work books and past best sellers no longer in print on the schedule for the coming year. The digital evolution has brought publishing back to the individual where…
What Is Entertainment?
Someone I once knew told me that if you want to know where Fascism began you should look at the Colosseum in Rome. A place where men and women were slaughtered, where Cicero said he felt sick at the sight of the murder of fifty elephants in one day and a place where the things…
Families
It is a joke that we cannot relate to the people we are related too, but it is a very common occurrence. Somehow we believe that the saying ‘black sheep of the family has some relevance. Actually it is a pretty appalling and ignorant saying which presupposes that there is some standard to which we…
Learning Curves
It is a fascinating question: why are we all different? What choices are involved in the different things we all choose to learn, and what lack of choice is there in the things we have no choice but to learn. And when are those choices made? Locke thought we were born with nothing imprinted on…
Childhood
Childhood is a pleasant invention. I recall reading about Elizabethans dressing their children like miniature adults and on one occasion a four year old boy crying for its mother as it was hanged on the scaffold for stealing bread. It is hard to pinpoint exactly when we gained an idea of childhood, for as late…
Electronic Wars
I was fascinated recently to read how the Iranian nuclear reactor complex was ‘attacked’ by a highly targeted virus in their computer systems. It reminds me of the Kosovo conflict when NATO revealed some of their command posts were receiving similar attempts to upset their command-and-control structures. Now if like me, you have an anti-virus…
Ways To Measure Poverty
We could look at the amount of money people have relative to each other, which is the main way we measure poverty between countries. We could look at the opportunities afforded citizens in different countries and mark those with easier health care, better education, healthier foods. We could look at the politics and the life…